Summit Conferences

Meetings between or among the heads of rival or enemy powers in an attempt to satisfy mutual demands through negotiation rather than warfare. Summit conferences are not just meetings between heads of state. A true summit requires powers that are more or less evenly matched and rulers who have the power and prestige to make major decisions on the spot with the authority to carry them out afterwards. A practical agenda for a summit meeting must be devised ahead of time, and those involved must not only have agreed on some subjects to discuss, but those on which they are willing to make compromises or concessions.

[Page 694]The modern era of the summit conference began in 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and French Premier Edouard Daladier met with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in an attempt to avert war on the European continent. In the end, in exchange for Hitler's promise to avoid further aggression, Churchill, Mussolini, and Daladier agreed to allow Hitler to control the German-speaking border regions of Czechoslovakia, thus effectively eliminating Czechoslovakia as a military power. Unfortunately, for those who hoped this would keep the peace, Hitler reneged on the agreement within months, sending troops into Prague, and then invading Poland. The result was World War II.

In the modern era, summits continued to make sense as a means of gaining concessions from other nations. Modern methods of communication and travel make it relatively easy for leaders to cover large distances quickly if they wish to talk things over in person. Because they do not have to be absent or out of touch for long periods, heads of state can risk travel in a way that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era.

A series of summit meetings among the leaders of the victorious Allies of World War II—the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain—were held to decide how to carve up what was left after the war. The first of these summit meetings was held in occupied Teheran, Iran, in 1943. In 1945, Allied leaders met again at the Crimean summer resort of Yalta. Later that summer, when a third meeting was held in Potsdam, Great Britain's presence was largely irrelevant, and the summit primarily consisted only of the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union.

Summit conferences have remained an important part of international diplomacy since the end of World War II. In the modern era of mass media, a summit conference always leads to banner headlines, television specials, photo opportunities, and a lot of print and broadcast commentary.

During the Cold War, U.S. presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan met their Soviet counterparts from Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev at summits held in places from Glassboro, New Jersey, to Reykjavik, Iceland. Although they sometimes came to agreement on practical details, such as reductions in the number of ballistic missiles held by each country, arguably these summit meetings had no true effect on the course of the Cold War.

The last of the summit meetings held between the two superpowers was in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1987. At that summit conference, Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan came close to agreement on a massive disarmament plan. At the same time, however, for all intents and purposes the Soviet Union was already disintegrating.

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